Whenever my friends and I wanted to play with Barbies, we always liked to pretend they were a married couple, like playing house. Since we never had any Ken dolls, we would simply cut off the hair of a few of the Barbies we had lying around and make them lesbians. It was perfectly acceptable in our minds for two women to be together. It was something we grew up with, we always accepted it as a perfectly normal alternate choice if there was no Ken. By making the dolls lesbians made the whole concept more “normal”. Growing up with this automatic acceptance has prepared us for the world now; it has opened our minds to new ideas and made us realize that there is not necessarily a “right” way to go about things. Barbie has taught young girls to create their own sense of normalcy, which then prepared them for the quirks that may appear in the real world.
Whenever my friends and I wanted to play with Barbies, we always liked to pretend they were a married couple, like playing house. Since we never had any Ken dolls, we would simply cut off the hair of a few of the Barbies we had lying around and make them lesbians. It was perfectly acceptable in our minds for two women to be together. It was something we grew up with, we always accepted it as a perfectly normal alternate choice if there was no Ken. By making the dolls lesbians made the whole concept more “normal”. Growing up with this automatic acceptance has prepared us for the world now; it has opened our minds to new ideas and made us realize that there is not necessarily a “right” way to go about things. Barbie has taught young girls to create their own sense of normalcy, which then prepared them for the quirks that may appear in the real world.